Alex Calamia forecasts the weather for News 12 Long Island, where he’s Senior Meteorologist and the creator of “Garden Guide.” He grew up on Long Island, studied meteorology at Rutgers, graduated in 2016, and spent his early career in Gainesville, Florida and Columbia, South Carolina before coming home. His News 12 bio calls him an Emmy Award-winning meteorologist. Beyond that, there isn’t much public record to work with — no confirmed age, no birthday, nothing about a spouse or family, and no real salary or net worth figure anywhere. If you see a specific number for either of those on some other site, it’s made up.
Table of Contents
- Who Is Alex Calamia?
- Alex Calamia at a Glance
- Education: Rutgers and a Childhood Spent Watching Storms
- Career History
- Notable Career Moments
- His Current Role at News 12 and “Garden Guide”
- Awards and Recognition
- Community Work, School Visits, and Viewer Interaction
- How Local TV Meteorologist Careers Typically Work
- Age, Personal Life, and Family
- Salary and Net Worth: Why There’s No Real Number
- FAQ
- Conclusion
Who Is Alex Calamia?
Watch morning weather on News 12 Long Island and you’ve probably seen him. Alex Calamia is a native Long Islander who left home to cut his teeth in Southern TV markets, then came back to forecast for the same viewers he grew up around. He’s become a familiar face across Nassau and Suffolk County, and off the forecast desk, he’s the guy behind “Garden Guide,” a segment where gardening advice and local climate knowledge meet in a way that only makes sense coming from an actual meteorologist.
He’s not famous outside that world, though. No network gig, no viral moment, nothing that would generate a real press paper trail. Which is exactly why a lot of the “biography” pages about him online are guessing at things they can’t actually know.
Alex Calamia at a Glance
| Category | Detail |
|---|---|
| Known as | Alex Calamia |
| Occupation | Meteorologist, weather anchor, broadcast journalist |
| Employer | News 12 Long Island |
| Title | Senior Meteorologist |
| Signature segment | “Garden Guide” (creator and host) |
| Education | B.S. Meteorology, Rutgers University (SEBS), 2016 |
| From | Long Island, New York |
| Earlier stops | Gainesville, FL; Columbia, SC (WLTX) |
| Recognition | Emmy Award-winning meteorologist, per News 12 (year/category not public) |
| Age / birthday | Not public |
| Spouse / family | Not public |
| Salary / net worth | No real figure exists |
Education: Rutgers and a Childhood Spent Watching Storms
Calamia traces his interest in weather back to family trips to Florida as a kid — he’s said the subtropical storms there fascinated him in a way New York weather never quite did. That stuck. He went on to study meteorology at Rutgers University, graduating from the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS) in 2016.
Rutgers has a program called “WeatherWatchers” that puts meteorology students in front of a green screen starting freshman year, and Calamia has credited it with building the on-camera confidence it took his whole college career to develop. He also spent time as a weather observer at Rutgers Gardens — a site with records going back to 1896 — took part in a Midwest field trip chasing supercells and tornadoes, and worked on a research project alongside the state climatologist.
Career History
His path to Long Island ran through smaller markets first, which is how this usually goes for broadcast meteorologists.
- Freelance weather producer, New York City. His first job out of Rutgers. He built forecast graphics for on-air talent rather than appearing on camera himself.
- Gainesville, Florida. He applied to something like a hundred jobs before landing this one — an on-air meteorologist and reporter role. He’s said he had zero reporting experience going in, and that covering environmental and gardening stories, on top of weather, is what made him stand out.
- Columbia, South Carolina (WLTX). Weekday morning meteorologist. Part of the job meant tending a garden right outside the studio — which, in hindsight, was basically a dry run for “Garden Guide.”
- News 12 Long Island. Home turf. He brought the severe weather and hurricane experience from Florida and South Carolina back to a New York audience.
Notable Career Moments
Two stories come up in Calamia’s own telling of his career, and both center on severe weather.
The first is Hurricane Irma, his first hurricane season on air in Gainesville. North Florida ended up spared the worst of it, but he still pulled something close to a 20-hour stretch — on the green screen, then outside in the wind and rain — and came home to no power and no air conditioning.
The second is a tornado outbreak that hit Columbia the morning after Easter in April 2020, his first spring as WLTX’s morning meteorologist. It was his first time anchoring wall-to-wall severe weather coverage, and he’s described seeing tornado debris signatures on radar for the first time that morning. The station was under COVID-19 restrictions at the time, so staff got special access back into the building just to cover the storms.
He’s also talked about starting his WLTX shifts around 2 a.m. and treating viewer interaction as part of the job from early on — scrolling through weather and garden Facebook groups for comments and questions he could work into the day’s content. That habit lines up pretty directly with the viewer-submission version of “Garden Guide” he later built at News 12.
His Current Role at News 12 and “Garden Guide”
At News 12, Calamia has carried both the Morning Meteorologist and Senior Meteorologist titles depending on which station bio you check, and he shows up across the network’s Long Island, Hudson Valley, Westchester, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Connecticut feeds.
The thing he’s most known for, though, is “Garden Guide” — pest control, drought watering, planting windows, frost dates, all filtered through an actual meteorologist’s read on soil and seasonal patterns. It’s not a lifestyle segment bolted onto a weather job; it grew out of the weather job.
Awards and Recognition
His News 12 bio describes him as an “Emmy-Award winning meteorologist.” That’s about as far as the public record goes. News 12 as a network wins Emmys regularly and in bulk — the station took home 21 New York Emmy Awards in a single year (2024) across its various markets — but none of the public award lists checked for this piece named Calamia specifically, and his bio doesn’t give a year or category either. So the claim is included because it’s how his employer describes him, not because it’s been independently confirmed against a ceremony record. If precision matters for publication, this is the one line worth double-checking before it goes live.
Community Work, School Visits, and Viewer Interaction
There’s a real pattern in his News 12 coverage of showing up in person, not just on the forecast desk. He’s visited a Centereach pre-K classroom to walk kids through the different jobs inside a weather station, and stopped by a Ronkonkoma middle school’s Garden Club to talk plants with students. He’s turned up in News 12’s town-by-town community features too, including one from Massapequa.
On top of that, News 12 runs an ongoing bit where viewers submit their own gardening questions, photos, and videos for him to answer on air, and he’s covered live storm conditions during Long Island snow events, including one tied to a state of emergency declaration. None of that shows up if you only look at his job title, but it’s a real, documented part of what he actually does.
How Local TV Meteorologist Careers Typically Work
Calamia’s path — small freelance role, then a smaller Southern market, then a bigger market closer to home — is close to the standard playbook in broadcast meteorology, and it’s worth explaining why, since it puts his résumé in context.
Most on-air meteorologists in the U.S. hold a bachelor’s degree in meteorology or atmospheric science (or complete a set of AMS/NWS-approved coursework if their degree is in something adjacent), and many pursue an AMS Seal of Approval or a Certified Broadcast Meteorologist (CBM) credential once they’re working, since local stations often look for it. Career progression usually runs through market size: entry-level jobs cluster in smaller media markets — places like Gainesville, sitting outside the country’s top 100 TV markets — where there’s more room to get reps forecasting on air. Meteorologists who cover the Southeast tend to build heavy severe-weather and hurricane-season experience quickly, simply because the region sees more of both than most of the Northeast does in a typical year. That experience becomes a selling point when applying to larger or home-region markets, which is roughly the move Calamia made in going from Gainesville to Columbia to New York.
Long Island’s own weather adds a different kind of complexity: Nor’easters, coastal flooding, and hurricane threats to shoreline communities, which is a different forecasting problem than inland tornado outbreaks even though both fall under “severe weather.” A meteorologist who’s worked both types of markets, as Calamia has, typically arrives at a coastal Northeast station with a broader base of severe-weather forecasting experience than someone who started there.
Age, Personal Life, and Family
This is usually where “biography” sites start inventing things, so it’s worth being direct: there’s no birth date, no age, no wedding announcement, no spouse’s name, nothing about kids — not in his News 12 bio, not in his Rutgers profile, not in his AMS interview. Nowhere.
For contrast, a News 12 colleague of his, meteorologist Rich Hoffman, has a bio that mentions his wife and two kids outright. That’s what it looks like when someone’s chosen to share that information. Calamia’s bios just don’t have anything like it, which means either he hasn’t made it public, or nobody’s asked, or both. Either way, filling that gap with a guess isn’t reporting. It’s just making something up and hoping nobody checks.
Salary and Net Worth: Why There’s No Real Number
Local TV salaries swing wildly based on market size, station ownership, seniority, and union contracts, and none of that is disclosed for individual on-air meteorologists like Calamia. There’s no SEC filing, no salary database entry, no union rate sheet, nothing tying a real number to his name.
Any article giving you a specific dollar figure for his salary, income, or net worth is presenting a guess dressed up as a fact. That’s a common move in low-effort celebrity content, but it’s not something worth repeating here. If a legitimate number ever surfaces, it’ll come from a union disclosure, a market salary survey, or Calamia saying something himself — none of which exists right now. Same story with claims about a house or a particular lifestyle: there’s no record of either.
FAQ
How old is Alex Calamia?
Unknown, publicly. He graduated Rutgers in 2016, which puts him roughly in his late twenties to early thirties as of 2026 — but that’s a guess based on graduation timing, not a confirmed age.
Is he married? Does he have kids?
Not publicly documented anywhere. His official bios don’t mention a spouse, partner, or family — unlike some of his News 12 colleagues, whose bios do.
What’s his salary or net worth?
No credible figure exists. Anything you find claiming otherwise is a guess.
Has he won an Emmy?
His News 12 bio calls him an Emmy-Award winning meteorologist. The specific year and category aren’t publicly documented.
Does he have a Wikipedia page?
Not that turned up in research. His background is documented through News 12, Rutgers, and the American Meteorological Society instead.
What’s he known for besides forecasting?
“Garden Guide,” plus a steady record of school visits and community appearances across Long Island.
Does he actually interact with viewers?
Yes — the “Garden Guide” segment takes viewer-submitted questions and photos, something that echoes how he described engaging with audiences earlier in his career too.
What’s the most memorable weather event he’s covered?
Hurricane Irma in Gainesville, and the April 2020 tornado outbreak in Columbia — both come up when he talks about his career.
Conclusion
Strip away the guesswork and Calamia’s story is a pretty familiar one for broadcast meteorology: a Rutgers degree, a couple of Southern markets to build storm-forecasting chops, then a homecoming to Long Island — plus one genuinely original project in “Garden Guide” and a habit of actually showing up in the community. What’s missing — his age, his family, any real number for salary or net worth — is missing because it isn’t public, not because nobody bothered to look.
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Shahzad is the founder and lead writer at WorthRada. He writes about celebrity net worth, biographies, careers, income, and success stories, with a focus on providing clear, well-researched, and reliable information.
